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Issue #632
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 15th July’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked's MCP server makes tools like Cursor even more powerful by giving them access to the context that lives outside the code - your historical Slack threads, Confluence pages, Google Docs, JIRA tickets and more.
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: “Excellence is unlikely to happen if you don’t address the hard problems early in project execution. Habits for cultivating excellence won’t form unless you shed light on hard problems from the start... Simply put, when you lead a team to confront challenging aspects, the team will cultivate the right habits for excellence, and their efficacy levels increase, ultimately leading to improved team performance.”
Leadership Management
— Mark Copeland
tl;dr: As teams grow, both in size and number, leadership often shifts from enabling progress to managing complexity. How do you lead without becoming a bottleneck? If there's one thing I've learned from years of leading teams through complex software deliveries, it's that leadership isn't about micromanagement or top-down control. It's about something much more valuable - and, frankly, more rewarding. You need to let go of control, help teams align to a vision and be independent in order to be able to scale your leadership.
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: "With Claude Code + Unblocked, I've finally found the holy grail of engineering productivity: context-aware coding. It's not hallucinating - it's pulling insight from everything I've ever worked on." – Staff Engineer @ Nava Benefits
Promoted by Unblocked
Management Documentation
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “The Thayer Method, developed at West Point in the early 19th century, is built on a deceptively simple premise: the responsibility for learning lies with the student. Before class, cadets are expected to study the material in depth, wrestling with concepts on their own. The classroom, then, is not a place to receive information but to engage with it.”
Leadership Management
“One of the best programming skills you can have is knowing when to walk away for awhile.”
tl;dr: We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without - AI makes them slower.
Productivity AI
— Mark Henzi
tl;dr: Bugs come with innovation, and triage methods differ across teams. Evaluating bugs by likelihood and impact to generate a risk rating is an approach worth considering for prioritizing critical issues efficiently. This is how the engineering team at Atono manages bugs to keep development focused and moving forward.
Promoted by Atono
Management Guide
— Volodymyr Potiichuk
tl;dr: The author needed to enforce uniqueness on a large text field in PostgreSQL but encountered a limitation when attempting to create a unique B-Tree index. The operation failed in production due to the index row size exceeding PostgreSQL’s limit, prompting an exploration of how to handle uniqueness for large values efficiently.
PostgreSQL
— Wesley Rodriguez, Alok Ranjan
tl;dr: “In this piece, we’ll walk through how we solved for scalable, secure team-level encryption without slowing down the Dropbox experience. We’ll share our decision-making process, the technical challenges we faced, and how the solution we built is influencing the way we think about security for AI tools like Dash.”
Security Architecture
— Etienne Jacob
tl;dr: “The purpose of this article is to explain techniques that enabled me to make simulations like the one below, along with a lot of other organic looking things. We will focus on algorithmic techniques for artistic purpose rather than scientific meaning.”
Algo
Most Popular From Last Issue
Software Engineering With LLMs In 2025: Reality Check — Gergely Orosz
Notable Links
BrowserOS: OS agentic web browser.
FossFLOW: Isometric diagramming tool.
Pangolin: Tunneled reverse proxy server with access control.
RustFS: Distributed object storage software.
Watchfiles: Simple, modern and fast file watching and code reload for Python.
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